‘Jenni’ Shows Republican Difficulty Getting Women’s Votes

A health-care law supporter, left, argues with protesters outside the Supreme Court building in Washington. Photographer: Rich Clement/Bloomberg

Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- A woman named “Jenni” is the face
of one of the Republican Party’s biggest difficulties in the
Nov. 6 election: its estrangement from many female voters.

She’s the fictitious star of a television ad by President
Barack Obama’s campaign as Democrats warned of a Republican-led
“war on women” they said could end the constitutional right to
abortion if Republican Mitt Romney were elected.

“I’ve never felt this way before, but it’s a scary time to
be a woman,” the woman said in the ad that ran 8,715 times in
critical states including Colorado, Florida, Missouri and New
Hampshire.

The spot was one of many Democratic ads targeting women
voters after efforts by state and federal Republican lawmakers
that may have limited access to abortion, birth control and
equal pay.

Added to that were Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s
statement that “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy,
and Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s reference to
pregnancies resulting from rape as “something God intended to
happen.” Both Republican candidates lost their elections.

The Republican Party “has a women problem,” said Jean
Schroedel, a politics professor at Claremont Graduate University
in California who focuses on issues affecting women and
children. “You can be opposed to abortion and still sound like
you care about women, but some of these comments cut really,
really deeply.”

‘Crossed a Line’

“They have crossed a line, absolutely crossed a line,”
Schroedel said. As many as one in four women in the U.S. have
been victims of sexual assault, including rapes leading to
pregnancy, she said.

For the past 10 years, the abortion issue has primarily
mobilized Republican women in opposition. That changed in this
election as Democratic women sought to protect their right to
abortion, she said.

Exit polls showed that Obama had an 11 percentage-point
advantage over Romney among female voters on Nov. 6. Four years
ago his support from women voters was 13 points higher than that
for Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee.

The Democratic theme of a “war on women” may have
prevented Romney from attracting more female voters, said Karlyn
Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute,
which supports the Republican principle of limited government.

Started Early

“The Democrats started very early in the Obama campaign
with the ‘war on women’ rhetoric,” said Bowman. “They were
very effective with their advertisements” and “got a huge
amount of media attention.”

On the abortion issue alone, Democrats and their allies ran
22,126 advertisements since the start of the campaign, compared
with 6,654 ads run by Republicans, according to Kantar Media’s
CMAG.

The ads tapped into efforts among Republican-led state
legislatures to enact restrictions on abortion. In all, 92 anti-abortion-rights measures passed in 2011, the highest in history;
this year ranks second with 40 measures, according to the
Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that backs reproductive
and abortion rights.

According to an Oct. 5-11 Gallup Poll of voters in swing
states, a plurality, or 39 percent of women, said abortion was
the most important issue for their gender in this election.
Nineteen percent of women said jobs. Men identified jobs as the
top issue for their gender.

‘Swamped’ Other Issues

“It was very striking and it swamped every other issue,”
said Bowman.

Even so, she said she remains skeptical that the issue had
heightened importance this year because there was no historical
data to compare the poll findings with.

Republicans may have been hurt by the U.S. House proposal
to change Medicare’s guaranteed benefit into a voucher program,
according to a poll by Emily’s List, a political action
committee geared toward electing Democratic women who support
abortion rights. Sixty-nine percent of independent women in
battleground states said the plan would be a reason not to vote
Republican, according to the Aug. 18 survey.

Emily’s List President Stephanie Schriock said that while
Obama didn’t increase his margin with women voters this year,
their concern over threats to their reproductive and health
rights motivated them to vote for him. In 2008, their chief
concerns were economic, she said.

“We had a debate about rape this year. How did that
happen? That’s just absurd,” she said.

Planned Parenthood

Republicans in Congress also unsuccessfully tried to end
federal funds for Planned Parenthood, which focuses most of its
services on women’s health care including physical exams, health
screening and vaccines. Party members also sought to let
employers refuse to cover birth control and other health
services that violate their religious beliefs.

Many Republicans opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,
the first piece of legislation Obama signed into law in January
2009, which makes it easier for workers to win pay-discrimination lawsuits. An Emily’s List poll in July found that
71 percent of women in battleground states said a Republican
attempt to block the measure was a convincing reason not to vote
for that party.

Difficulty in connecting with women voters may be a problem
for Republicans in future elections, said Bowman. In the next
Census, she said, single women for whom abortion and
contraception issues are most important are expected to make up
47 percent of adult women. That number was in the 30s during the
1980s, she said.

Entering Politics

Concern over issues affecting women and families may lead
more women to enter politics, said Dianne Bystrom, director of
the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa
State University.

The largest number of women ever will serve in the next
Congress starting in January, according to the Center for
American Women and Politics, a unit of the Eagleton Institute of
Politics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Senate Democrats chose a woman, Patty Murray of Washington,
to lead their recruitment and election efforts this year, and
the effort paid off, said Bystrom.

New Congress

Twenty women -- 16 Democrats and four Republicans -- will
serve in the Senate next year, compared with two in the session
that convened in 1991. The House will have a record of at least
76 women -- 56 Democrats and 20 Republicans. New Hampshire will
have the first all-female congressional delegation -- two women
senators and two women House members.

While some female potential candidates may be turned off
from politics by Washington’s vitriolic environment, they
increasingly see federal policies as a threat to their
communities and their families, Bystrom said.

“Men oftentimes see politics as a career, and women tend
to see it as a solution to problems that affect them
personally,” she said. “As compared to previous elections,
abortion, birth control and health care really were high on
women’s radar screens.”